Dustin's Pages

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Colorado Software Summit 2008 CD-ROM

I received my copy of the post-conference CD-ROM for the Colorado Software Summit 2008 yesterday morning (Friday, November 7). This 670MB resource contains the latest versions of speakers' slides that include changes made during the conference in response to participants' feedback. For example, I added several slides to my presentations based on feedback and even included some slides specifically calling out the questions asked with answers. Later in this blog entry, I'll reference some of my previous blog entries that are tightly coupled with my slides and/or code examples on the CD-ROM.

There are several advantages to having each speaker present on each of his or her two topics three times each during the week. Besides the obvious advantages of reduced conflicts between an attendee's most desired sessions and the ability to hear from others which presentations are "must-see," a third advantage is that speakers can and often do include feedback from previous presentations of the same slides into the next presentation. The slides on the post-conference CD are often improved from the original slides provided on the pre-conference USB drive.

I was surprised at the number of photographs included on the CD-ROM. I submitted a relatively small number of photographs of the conference center and of the Keystone area, but one or more of the other contributors of photographs really went all out. There are over 350 photographs on the CD that include photographs of the sessions, of the attendees, and many of the beautiful scenery in the area.

I tried to include README.txt (or similarly named) files in each directory in the examples I included on the CD-ROM. There is a "jmx" directory under which all of my examples for "Java Management Extensions Circa 2008" presentation reside. All directories other than this "jmx" directory are related to examples for my other presentation (Applying Flash to Java: Flex and OpenLaszlo). These examples have a little more complicated directory structure because they involve Flex files, OpenLaszlo files, and other files related to the generation of a WAR file.